Yes! a DNG converter for Linux...

3 weeks ago, i have received a mail from a contributor named Holger Berger. He send me a patch against dcraw implementation included in libkdcraw, to parallelize demosaicing operations using OpenMP library. After some tests on my dual core computer i have immediately felt the power of parallelized code: it's faster.

We have tried to contact Dave Coffin to include this patch officially in dcraw... without success (no response). Why ? He don't like OpenMp certainly... So we have looked for another way to use this patch.

Take care, it's always a BETA code with many of new bugs not yet fixed... Do not use yet in production...

I am currently working with Andi Clemens to improve some important usability issues in Image Editor and Showfoto.

This is a great news for photographers: digiKam is now able to edit metadata from RAW files. Andreas Huggel from Exiv2 project has started to support writting mode with some TIFF/EP RAW files in this library. Currently Adobe DNG, Nikon NEF, and Pentax PEF file are supported.

See below a screenshot of digiKam for KDE4 editing XMP metadata from a NEF file:

JPEG, the current standard

Currently, all camera support JPEG format to store photograph. This format is very popular, robust. Image can be encoded/decoded very quickly and algorithm are very optimized to be embedded into device. Under Linux libjpeg is available and very stable, but is not maintained since a very long time.

Today, i have updated libkdcraw with last dcraw implementation from Dave Cofin. New pro camera are now supported as Nikon D700, Canon EOS 1000D, and Olympus E-520. So, digiKam is now able to play with these cameras as well.

I'm currently at Akademy 2008. The event is located in Belgium near Mechelen (south of Anvers).

This is really a big event about KDE community. It's very well organized (memorable social event in a Belgium brewery, with a lots of beer sponsored by Nokia who are connecting peoples really (:=)))...

Work is in progress. As you can see in the video given below, a lots of new features have been added compared to previous version described here.

See the full screen video (ogg - 5Mb)

There are severals entries in bugzilla about to be able to set a customized settings for each RAW image imported in editor. This is a advanced vision for photograph which want to adjust finely all settings during RAW workflow. I have started to implement a Raw Import tool for image editor. The first demo is available below:

See the full screen video (ogg - 6Mb)